This from James Parks at the AFL-CIO Now blog:
http://www.aflcio.org/...
Women are seeing red because their paychecks still lag far behind those of men--almost four months behind. Today is Equal Pay Day--on average, a woman has to work until April 25 to get the same pay men averaged the previous year. Last year, women workers were paid only 77 cents for every dollar a man received, up a penny from 2004. The wage gap costs the average American woman working full-time between $700,000 and $2 million over the course of her lifetime, according to Brandeis University economist Evelyn Murphy.
To commemorate Equal Pay Day, the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), an AFL-CIO constituency group, encouraged its members to wear red today to symbolize how far women and people of color are "in the red" because of unequal pay. Today, women's groups, including CLUW, the National Committee on Pay Equity and Business and Professional Women/USA, launched the WAGE Project (Women Are Getting Even). Across the country, women are forming WAGE Clubs to raise the issue of pay equity and mobilize for paycheck fairness.
The wage gap between men and women narrowed by a penny last year only because men's average earnings fell more than women's. Women's average earnings dropped 1 percent to $31,223, while men's earnings dropped 2.3 percent to $40,798. Median earnings for women of color continue to lag. In 2004, African American women earned an average $27,730 (68 percent of men's earnings), Latinas earned $23,444 (57 percent) and Asian American women earned $35,975 (88 percent).
Joining a union continues to be the best way for women to narrow the wage gap. Women in unions earned 31 percent more than their nonunion counterparts in 2005, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. For Latinas, the contrast was even sharper: Median earnings of union members were 37 percent higher than among their nonunion peers.
The AFL-CIO and CLUW are backing two equal pay proposals in Congress. The Fair Pay Act (S.840/H.R.1697) would prohibit wage discrimination for work in equivalent jobs while requiring some employers to disclose their overall pay statistics. The Paycheck Fairness Act (S.841/H.R.1687) would strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963 by allowing tougher penalties and making it easier to file class-action lawsuits in sex discrimination cases.